


Maybe I just want to breathe (maybe I just don't believe)

by EponineTheStrange (gallifreyandglowclouds)



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:51:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyandglowclouds/pseuds/EponineTheStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karen kisses Matt when they’re drunk (can be set at any time you choose) and then tells him it means nothing. He gets really upset but hides it from her but tells Arthur, he gets told he’s being an idiot and things keep piling up until he tries to commit suicide while Karen is around and he gets sent to hospital. Then Karen tells him what she actually felt and why she kissed him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe I just want to breathe (maybe I just don't believe)

So they’re in Karen’s hotel room in New York, having a laugh at Arthur’s expense over some stupid moment that nearly made it in to an episode of Confidential. There’s been a lot of booze going around, starting at the bar where they met in SoHo, and then the restaurant where they had dinner and then when they got back to Karen’s hotel room, she realises that this whole trip is happening at Adult Swim’s expense, so they can raid the mini-bar as well.

So, it’s probably the fact that she’s in the process of destroying her liver that makes Matt’s lips look so sublimely kissable, and probably why after they’re done with their hysterical fits of laughter over the fact that Arthur is eighty percent ballerina, she plants a sloppy, wet, warm kiss right on his lips. It’s not a great or particularly notable kiss, because they’re both just smashed, and generally kissing when smashed tends to involve a lot of uncoordinated face-sucking.

Matt looks like someone’s hit him with a bolt of lightning when they pull apart. Karen feels like it, but that doesn’t stop her from falling asleep on his shoulder thirty seconds later.

* * *

She wakes up in the exact same position that she fell asleep in. Matt’s still passed out, and she can still smell the tiniest bit of booze on his breath.

_Holy fuck, I kissed Matt last night._

Those last five words are alien to her, and they don’t seem to quite fit with reality. She’s afraid of linking herself to Matt – not because she doesn’t like him, but because she’s afraid of fucking things up, because if she has learned one thing about herself, it is that she is a human tornado and that she destroys whatever comes in to her path.

So, that is why she lies to him. Yeah, it’s stupid and petty and a lot of other terrible things, but that’s what she needs to do.

He wakes up about ten minutes after she does and kisses her on the forehead, which was probably intended as a tender gesture but just makes her feel a bit dirty.

“Hey Kaz,” he whispers, face still close to hers.

“Hey,” she says, “Matt, I have to apologise about last night.”

“Why?”

“Because it was stupid, and I was drunk,” Karen says, trying to convince herself as well as convincing him. “I was in a weird place.”

He contemplates what she has just said for a while, and then says, “So it didn’t actually mean anything?” He sounds horrifically disappointed.

“No, Matt,” she says, climbing off the bed and trying to put as much distance between the two of them as she possibly can. “I, uh, need to go see Aislinn. I’ll see you later, Matt.”

She grabs her purse and beats a hasty exit from the room. He gives her a little half-hearted wave as the door slams.

* * *

It is that night in New York that pushes Matt’s very carefully constructed world clean off of its axis.  One of the key assumptions that guided his behaviour around Karen (and well, a lot of other people) was that Karen had romantic feelings towards him, as he did for her, and they were simply circling around the inevitable spark that would start things between the two of them.

He now knows that his assumption was, in this case, completely and totally wrong, and he tries to think over the past four years of his life and discover where precisely he went wrong.

He sits in the hotel room in deep contemplation for hours on end, and it’s only when Arthur calls him that he sort of snaps out of it.

“Dude,” he says when Matt picks up the phone, “we were supposed to meet for lunch today!”

Matt checks his watch and realises that it’s twelve-thirty in the afternoon, so yes, he has missed his lunch date with Arthur. “Right, sorry. I’ll be there in an hour, okay?”

“Cool,” Arthur yells, and he sounds like he’s standing beside a freeway or something. “See you then!” 

* * *

Someone snaps a picture of him and Arthur looking really happy to see each other, but after that the whole date with him and Arthur is pretty fucking dismal. To be fair, Arthur is entirely allowed to be totally done with him and Karen, because he had to put up with it for three years, and Matt understands now that that’s more than anyone should ever have to deal with.

“So she kissed you?” He says, peering at Matt over his weird microbrewed beer.

Matt nods.

“But then told you it means nothing?”

Matt nods again.

“Okay, so there are one of two things happening here,” Arthur says, leaning back in his chair. “Thing one: there really is nothing going on, in which case, you’re going to have to move on with your life. Thing two: she’s lying about the fact that it means nothing, in which case that means that Karen’s got shit to sort out that’s beyond the both of us, and you need to move on until she can catch up and sort out what she’s dealing with. Either way,” and he takes another sip of his beer, “there’s not a ton you can do to mitigate your mutual idiocy.”

“I don’t think I’m the idiot in this situation, to be honest,” Matt says, frowning at Arthur.

“You have done enough stupid shit in the sort-of-but-not-really pursuit of Karen Gillan that you are a permanent idiot, Matt.”

* * *

He goes back to Detroit, and tries his best not to think about it.

Doesn’t work, because whenever he closes his eyes he can still feel her lips on his, and he starts having the kind of dreams that he used to have on DW but had kind of calmed down since then, but at least then if he dreamt of him and Karen having glorious sex on his dining room table he’d at least get to see her the next day (which, oddly enough, mitigated the awkwardness of having sex dreams about her), he now has to wake up to the fact that he’s not probably not going to see Karen again without having to deal with awkwardness and weird feelings.

That makes him sad, and then when he goes back to the UK, his mom and his sister and his dad and pretty much everyone he knows doesn’t fucking stop asking about Karen and whether they saw each other when they were in the same country, and Matt loves his mother dearly, he really, really does, but he can’t tell her what happened with Karen and her badgering drives him so crazy that he wants to smash his cellphone to the ground just so that she won’t bring it up when they talk.

He’s back at home for a weekend during a break in filming the Christmas special, and he has another one of those stupid dreams about Karen that leaves him with the sheets of his bed in his childhood room fisted in his hands.

He goes to the bathroom, and splashes some water on his face to try and calm himself down. He opens the medicine cabinet, and sees that his mum just got her sleeping pills refilled.

He takes the whole bottle.

Chases it with a shot of whiskey, too. 

* * *

Karen is Scottish, and this means that she is as steeped in drinking culture as you can possibly get, and has once witnessed the horror that is getting your stomach pumped, so she knows what Matt went through when his mother found him, and it’s lucky that she was worried about how moody he’d been since he’d come back to the UK, and found him curled up in the bathtub with alcohol and sleeping pills, because had she not found him until the morning, he would be dead.

The filming for GOTG is going on without her, but the director seemed to sort of get that she had to go to Northampton the minute Matt’s mom called her, and so they’ll figure something out, she’s sure about it. Moff’s probably having a brain aneurysm, because that’s how he is about delays in filming, and she wonders whether Matt might regenerate a bit prematurely in the special through the magic of CGI. He’ll need a long break from everything after this.

Matt’s mum hugged her – hugged her! – the minute she burst through the doors of the hospital, which means that Matt didn’t tell her what had happened between the two of them in New York. Every time that Laura-Jayne or Matt’s mum comes back with coffee and a muffin, she wants to yell, _I’m the reason he’s fucking here in the first place!_ Their kindness makes her feel a bit soiled.

Matt’s still out and they’re not being allowed in when Laura-Jayne comes and sits down beside Karen.

“He told me what happened with the two of you,” she says, staring straight ahead.

“Oh.”

“It’s not your fault, you know, Karen,” she says. “I don’t blame you, at least.”

“Thanks, but I’ve been beating myself up pretty good about it.”

“Did you tell him the truth about how you felt about him?”

Karen shakes her head.

Laura-Jayne sighs. “Well, that’s shitty, Karen, but he didn’t have to do this.”

“Fucking idiot.”

“I know, right?”

“Can’t believe I’m in love with him,” Karen says.

Laura-Jayne looks over at Karen and says, “When all this is over, he’s going to need a lot, okay?”

Karen nods.

“You don’t leave his side. And someday, Karen, when the time is right, and I don’t know when that is because I don’t know how the two of you operate, you tell him the truth, okay?”

Karen nods. “I owe him that.”

“You kind of do, Karen, but don’t do it out of obligation. Blueberry or raspberry muffin?” 

* * *

He wakes up eventually.

Karen’s the one sitting in his hospital room when he does.

He doesn’t look happy to see her, but he doesn’t look surprised either.

“Hey, Kaz,” he says quietly.

“Hey to you, too,” she replies. 

* * *

Karen doesn’t go back to the US for a long, long time, which Matt thinks is kind of nice because he doesn’t hate her for what happened. It also turns out that the physical recovery from his stupid suicide attempt isn’t the hardest part – it’s the dealing with the emotional bits of it too, and having Karen coming back from wherever she’s filming to Northampton for a couple of days a week (perhaps, he thinks, she’s acquired enough star power to demand weekends off from the shows and movies he’s worked on), and being able to watch stupid movies with her and eat Pad Thai is just as helpful as the therapy he does twice a week, because he has his best friend back now.

They don’t talk about what happened before or what he did, and that works for him for about two months, but then he just feels trapped again, because he needs to talk to her about what happened between the two of them, because it’s important shit that needs to be addressed.

The first night that Matt’s parents actually go out for a few hours, he sits beside Karen on the couch in his living room, eating pizza and watching Jeremy Kyle. He flicks off the TV, and she turns to look at him.

“Can we talk?” He asks.

“If you feel up to it,” she replies, casual as ever.

“I’m really sorry about what happened in New York.”

“I am too, but I suspect for different reasons, Matt.” 

“Okay,” he says. “Well, I’m sorry for misinterpreting things.”

“Well,” Karen says, “I’m sorry for not being honest with you about how I was feeling about you.”

Oh. Wow.

“So I wasn’t misinterpreting things,” Matt says.

“You’re entitled to be fucking furious at me, Matt,” Karen says, “because what I did to you was terrible, and I didn’t think it’d push you to suicide, but it did, and I know I can’t give you back the time and fix the pain, Matt, but I’m just – I’m just sorry.”

He nods, and then rubs his eyes. “Um. Wow. I was not expecting that.”

“Yeah, if you need some time to process it –“

“Can I process it while we’re cuddling?”

Karen smiles and nods, and snuggles up to him on the couch.

* * *

It takes him a while and a lot of therapy to get the actual words out, and tell her that he loves her, but the joy on her face and in his heart are worth all the mountains of crap they had to climb over to get to that place. She kisses him again after that, but this time it’s real and wonderful. 


End file.
